Whether I am in retirement or not, the whole country, and I dare say the world, know that I was the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago between 2015 (September 9th) and 2025 (March 16), as such I led the Cabinet and have responsibility for the decisions made by the PNM Administration during that period.
I have been trying very hard to stay out and away from the decisions and narratives of today’s regime but the daily diet of misinformation and outright untruths force me to intervene in order to protect the record and to prevent any self-serving revision of the facts.
1. The UWI Debe Campus.
The University of the West Indies is not a government department but instead is a regional institution governed by charter and is headquartered at Mona, Jamaica, where all aspects of the regional University funding and operations are discussed beforehand and approved, up front by the Senate / University Grants Committee (UGC).
The creation and expansion of faculties have been done on many occasions in our various territories and except for the Debe Campus, none has ever descended into acrimony, bacchanal and lies about paternity.
The reason being, the Debe campus was gifted to the University in the form of infrastructure for a law faculty (which has since morphed into a full campus including medical school) without the sustainable, substantial funding to cover intake and operations as trumpeted by the midwife of this adventure.
Government’s struggle to fund the St Augustine campus and UTT is public information embodied in the National budget.
The same cannot be said of the new Debe facility which came into being without the proper procedures and more importantly, funding arrangements.
Thus the period 2015-2019 was the worst possible time for the UWI to look to the Government to prioritize funding for territorial expansion when national revenues fell from $50 billion to $38 billion.
This became a financial struggle and burden upon the University which could only have looked to the Government for help.
As if that was not bad enough, up comes Covid and its deleterious effects 2019-2022 and beyond.
During the pandemic as part of the operations and management of the emergency through the parallel Health System, the government with the cooperation of the UWI, incorporated some of the infrastructure at Debe.
Thus the history of this facility, can be shown, as described, to have nothing to do with racism, government deliberate neglect and abandonment or politics. It has everything to do with its unique concept at birth and the unfortunate confluence of the funding needs and its unique arrangements within a struggling UWI.
In fact the current Attorney General, outside of the current tomb of resurrection was very vociferous in his opposition to the spawning of another law school within the territory of Trinidad and Tobago.
If I am to quote, “a building does not a law school make, it is what the University allocation and faculty can sustain.”
2. Tobago Autonomy
The Prime Minister in seeking to demonstrate the seriousness of prioritizing her relationship with Chief Secretary Farley Augustine and Tobago’s Autonomy issues said “bills have been brought to the Parliament and they lapsed.“
In referring to the last actions of the Parliament, that is a blatant untruth generated to feed significant misinformation being sold in Tobago in preparation for a campaign of untruths that is already taking shape in Tobago.
The truth is that two bills, generated by widespread consultation in Tobago were brought to the Parliament, without any revision or abridgement and were subjected to detailed lengthy professional attention by a Joint Select Committee of the Parliament. At its final stages both bills were put to a vote.
One bill with measures for increased autonomy, administrative structures and improved finances was voted upon and passed, with only the PNM majority voting for it. The UNC did not support these measures.
The other bill, which was an amendment to the Constitution, was required to bring into effect, the measures which were passed in the first bill, was voted upon and was supported by the PNM. The UNC, with the public support of the Chief Secretary, did not support it and since this Amendment required a Special Majority, this bill was defeated in the House.
It was not a case of any bill being made to lapse, it was a recorded case of a vote being taken, the UNC withheld its votes and the Tobago Autonomy Bill was thus defeated.
It must also be said here that when these bills were being debated and created in Tobago the then Chief Secretary Orville London could not get a meeting with then Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissesar. It took the coming into being of the PNM Government, which I led, to open the door, receive the bills, take them to Parliament, subject them to Parliamentary scrutiny and put that product to a vote which in the end only the PNM supported.
Therefore I will not sit and watch the country’s historical record being distorted as if we are all asleep.
3. School Building Program
With respect to the misinformation that the PNM Government “shut down the school building program“, I leave the facts of that $2.4 billion challenge to be described and presented by the PNM when it chooses to be the Opposition. The necessary facts are all there.
We faced up to problems and fixed them, others create problems and lie about them.